Guide
Focus stacking software compared
Ten ways to merge a focus bracket, from free to $289, with what each costs, where it runs, whether it reads your RAW files, whether it can fix a halo by hand, and where your frames go while it works. Prices and features as the makers' pages, or the source each name links to, gave them on 4 October 2026.
| Software | Price | Runs on | Reads RAW | Retouching | Your frames |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus Stacks (this site) | Free, no account | Any current browser: Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook; iPad and phones at reduced size | Yes, decoded in the browser (Fujifilm X-Trans at a third of the sensor's size) | Yes: one round brush, from any aligned frame | On your device |
| Helicon Focus | Lite $30 a year or $115 for life; Pro $55 / $200; Premium $65 / $240. 30-day trial, then 4 MP output with a watermark | Windows, macOS | Yes (some Fujifilm files need Adobe DNG Converter first) | Pro and Premium; Lite has limited strokes, for evaluation | On your device |
| Zerene Stacker | Student $39, Personal $89, Prosumer $189, Professional $289, one-time. 30-day trial | Windows, macOS, Linux | No: convert to 16-bit TIFF first | Yes (more brushes from Prosumer) | On your device |
| Affinity (by Canva) | Free since October 2025; a Canva account is needed to download it | macOS, Windows | Yes | Yes (clone from source frames) | On your device |
| Adobe Photoshop | From $19.99 a month (Photography plan, 1 TB) | Windows, macOS (not on iPad for stacking) | Yes, through Camera Raw | By hand, on the layer masks | On your device |
| Luminar Neo | Focus Stacking is part of the paid plans | Windows, macOS | Yes | Not documented | On your device |
| Shine Stacker | Free and open source (LGPL-3.0) | Windows, macOS, Linux | Yes, since 2026 | Yes | On your device |
| StackLab | 30-day trial, then a yearly subscription or a lifetime purchase | macOS | Yes | Yes | On your device |
| Photopea | Free with advertising; Premium from $5 a month | Any browser | Opens many RAW files; stacking is a manual layer workflow | By hand, on the layer masks | In your browser |
| focusstackingonline.com | Free, paid for by advertising | Any browser | No: JPEG and other ordinary images | No | Uploaded to the service's server |
Which one, when
- You want a sharp picture now, on whatever computer you are at, without paying or installing: the stacker on this site. Full resolution, RAW straight from the camera, a 16-bit TIFF out, and the frames never leave the tab.
- A hard stack with a halo you need to paint out: a stacker with a retouching brush. This site's paints from any aligned frame, free; Zerene Stacker's is the one macro specialists praise most; Helicon Focus has one in its Pro and Premium editions (Lite allows a few strokes, for evaluation); Affinity, now free, can clone from the source frames.
- Hundreds of frames from a motorised rail, batches of stacks, GPU speed: Helicon Focus Pro, which adds batch processing, folder watching and GPU acceleration, or Zerene's Prosumer edition with slabbing for deep stacks.
- A short series and Photoshop is already open: Auto-Align and Auto-Blend are adequate for ten or twenty frames. The steps, and where it produces halos.
- You live in Lightroom: it cannot stack. The two routes that exist.
- Scripting, research or a pipeline: the open-source focus-stack command-line tool (MIT) or Shine Stacker's Python interface.
What the paid stackers charge for
You no longer have to pay for the merging itself: Affinity, Shine Stacker, Photopea and this site do it free, and a basic retouching brush and a second method are free here too. What the paid licences add is the work around them: more mature retouching (several brushes, more control), speed on very long stacks, batch processing of many brackets, 3D exports, Lightroom plug-ins, rail and camera control, and a commercial-use licence. If none of those is your problem, you do not need to pay.
How these were checked
Every price was read from the maker's own page or, where that page did not load, from the cited source, on 4 October 2026; Photoshop's is from a press report of Adobe's plan change. StackLab's prices were not shown in our region and are described rather than quoted. Prices change; the link in each row goes to the current one. Focus Stacks is our own product; nothing on this page is paid placement, and there are no affiliate links.